Billion-dollar pictures

Is one picture worth a hundred billion dollars? That’s the mostly-in-jest price tag that was put on this week’s portrait of the virtually complete international space station. Pictures may not be the most practical payoff from space exploration, but they’re definitely the biggest crowd-pleasers, as demonstrated by the latest batch of “Month in Space” pictures.

The entertainment value of imagery from the final frontier is just one of the five E's that justify jumping off this planet. The space station is expected to contribute to the other E's as well - for example, through proposed energy-beaming experiments and a host of studies aimed at smoothing the way for future exploration.

When all that research is added to images such as this week's "$100 billion photographs," does that make the estimated cost of the space station project worth it? That sounds like the perfect topic to discuss in the comment section below.

In the meantime, there are lots more billion-dollar pictures to delight in, including some new 3-D views of a Martian dust devil in Spirit's sights, and Opportunity's 360-degree view of its surroundings. You've got to be wearing your red-blue glasses to get the full effect of Resolution Crater, an alien foxhole visible on the right side of Opportunity's panorama.

For those of you who are resolved to adorn your computer desktop with big pictures from space, here are the sources for the images included in the latest "Month in Space" roundup:

• Set focus to infinity: Getty Images' Matt Stroshane grabbed a shot of other shooters shooting the shuttle Discovery's launch, and you'll find more fine blasts from the past in our FirstPerson photo gallery.
• Out for a walk: NASA's Human Spaceflight Web site shows spacewalker Mike Fincke at work.
• Multitude of moons: The Hubble Space Telescope's snapshot of four moons around Saturn one of my favorites. If you like the still image, you'll love the movie - as well as the behind-the-scenes story.
• Space spider: The European Southern Observatory's image of the Tarantula Nebula is like a work of abstract art - which gets better when you get closer.
• The gamma-ray sky: Can you spot the track of the sun in the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope's full-sky view? Check this labeled version of the picture for the answer.
• Ripples on Mars: The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provides a surreal, false-color view of Martian sand dunes.
• Three's a crowd: Hubblesite is the place to go for bigger views of a three-galaxy crash.
• Scorched earth: NASA's Earth Observatory has a satellite close-up of Australia's burned-out national park.
• Galaxies in gridlock: The Spitzer Space Telescope snagged a colorful infrared view of two galaxies about to collide. Check out this log posting for more.
• Ready to rumble: My, what big thrusters you have! Find out more about billionaire Charles Simonyi's return trip to the space station.
• Black hole in her hair: The Web site for NASA's Chandra X-Ray Center has bigger downloads of the Medusa Galaxy and its X-ray glow. 
• Paints of the pole: Europe's Mars Express provides groovy false-color and perspective views of Rupes Tenuis at the Martian north pole.
• Mars' junior moon: HiRISE gives the full treatment to Deimos, the Red Planet's smaller moon. Now it needn't feel inferior to Phobos.
• Mesa on a mesa: The story behind HiRISE's picture of the carved-away feature on Mars' Ganges Chasma gets more interesting when you see the bigger picture.
• Pastel planet: We've tried to make the Cassini orbiter's picture of Saturn and its shadowy rings as big as we could, but the full-size pictures make it still bigger and better.
• Danger zone: Earth Observatory provides a guide to the world's most potentially dangerous volcano, Popocatepetl in Mexico. By the way, keep an eye on Alaska's Mount Redoubt.
• A peculiar pair: ESO has the full story on Arp 261, including the story behind the bright star at the bottom of the image and the rainbow streaks toward the top.
• Darwin's islands: Think of the Aqua satellite's picture of the Galapagos Islands as a 200th-birthday present for Charles Darwin.
• Butterfly in space: In the ESO's picture, the Bug Nebula is too pretty to be called a bug.
• Beach Blanket Blastoff:This orange-tinged view of the Kepler probe's blastoff from Cape Canaveral is as delicious as a real Florida orange. Find out more about Kepler's planet-hunting mission. 

Finally, here's an update on a story we first told you about last week: I mentioned that Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope was getting an upgrade, and that more announcements were on the way. This week NASA and Microsoft announced that the sky-simulation software would incorporate 100 terabytes of the space agency's data - enough to fill 20,000 DVDs - under the terms of a Space Act Agreement. (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

You can look forward to high-resolution pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as well as the yet-to-be-launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"NASA is excited to collaborate with Microsoft to share its portfolio of planetary images with students and lifelong learners," said S. Pete Worden, director of the agency's Ames Research Center at California's Moffett Field. "This is a compelling astronomical resource and will help inspire our next generation of astronomers."

NASA already has a Space Act Agreement with Google for astronomical ventures such as Google Earth and Google Mars - so this new deal means there'll probably be a new dimension to the Microsoft-Google rivalry. And that in turn means it will be easier than ever for space enthusiasts to see NASA's multibillion-dollar imagery.

Update for 6:40 p.m. ET March 28:Here's the high-resolution source for the image of the space station at the top of the item, and here's the full caption. If you click around this photo album, you'll find many more stunning images from the space station flyaround.

Correction for 1 a.m. ET March 29: Yoinks! I typed "Jupiter" instead of "Saturn" for the comment on the "Multitude of Moons" picture. Oh, yeah, Saturn is the one that has the big rings. Thanks to everyone who pointed out the error.